BUSINESS CONTINUITY & DISASTER RECOVERY

"Tinius Olsen and CloudFronts worked together on implementing an integrated AX 2012 R3 on Azure, CRM Online and Field Service solution and Power BI analytics for our global operations. CloudFronts' technical and functional depth across the Microsoft Dynamics platform and round the clock post go live support ensured a successful Go Live for this mission critical implementation."

Organizations need a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy that a determines how applications, workloads, and data remain available during planned and unplanned downtime, and recover to regular working conditions as soon as possible. It covers the entire operation of the business, including physical facilities, people, communications, transportation, and IT.

Even a minor outage can put you at a competitive disadvantage. So, be ready with a business continuity plan that includes disaster recovery for all your major IT systems—without the expense of secondary infrastructure. An important part of your organization’s BCDR strategy is figuring out how to keep corporate workloads and applications up and running when any outage occur.

Azure Site Recovery service contributes to your BCDR strategy by orchestrating replication of on-premises physical servers and virtual machines to the cloud (Azure) or to a secondary site. When outages occur in your primary location, you fail over to the secondary site to keep applications and workloads available. You fail back to your primary location when it returns to normal operations.

Features:

Protect all of your major IT systems. Affordably. Achieve low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets for every major system in your organisation, simply and cost-effectively. Eliminate the hassle and cost of secondary datacenters and tap into nearly infinite capacity at a moment’s notice with a cloud-based data recovery solution designed for the needs of enterprises.

Unify data management, security, and protection. Achieve business goals for continuity and compliance throughout the lifecycle of your applications. Help secure your data with industry leading protection offered by encryption features. Manage and protect your applications with offerings such as Operations Management Suite, which includes centralised management, integrated data protection, and application availability solutions.

Ensure applications work when you need them the most. Rest assured during an outage or disaster scenario with a disaster recovery solution that protects and natively supports the widest range of enterprise applications of any cloud disaster recovery provider. Fail over your applications—and your entire datacenter—with automated recovery plans in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months.

Perform tests any time for complete confidence. When a disaster hits, the last thing you want is to run into a problem. Test your business continuity plans or run dev-test copies of production workloads in Azure whenever you need to, and without impacting users. Plus, test new versions of applications with copies of live data, and then seamlessly put the new version into production in your datacenter.

Get our whitepaper to see how Azure BC/DR works, and learn how to get started.

Why use Azure Site Recovery?

Simplify your BCDR strategy Site Recovery makes it easy to handle replication, failover and recovery of multiple business workloads and applications from a single location. It orchestrates replication and failover but doesn’t intercept your application data or have any information about it.

Easy failover and recovery It provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can also run planned failovers with a zero-data loss for expected outages, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss for unexpected disasters. After failover, you can failback to your primary sites.

Eliminate secondary datacenter You can replicate to a secondary on-premises site, or to Azure. Using Azure as a destination for disaster recovery eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary site, and replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides.

Integrate with existing BCDR technologies Azure Site Recovery partners with other application BCDR features. For example you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server back end of corporate workloads, including native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn to manage the failover of availability groups.

How does Azure Site Recovery work?

Azure Site Recovery can be deployed to plan replication in a number of scenarios:

Replicate VMware virtual machines You can replicate on-premises VMware virtual machines to Azure or to a secondary datacenter.

Replicate physical machines You can replicate physical machines running Windows or Linux to Azure or to a secondary datacenter.

Replicate Hyper-V VMs in System Center VMM clouds You can replicate on-premises Hyper-V virtual machines in VMM environment to Azure or to a secondary datacenter.

Migrate VMs You can use Site Recovery to migrate Azure IaaS VMs between regions, or migrate AWS Windows instances to Azure IaaS VMs. Currently only migration is supported which means you can fail over these VMs but you can’t fail them back.